FORUM:
Indigenous Peoples in the Global Revolutionary Era

To "Live Like King George" in Hawaiʻi and the United States: Entangled Exceptionalisms and Sovereignty Struggles in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1819

Christine Skwiot

In July
1776 in New York, General George Washington's troops attended a reading of the
Declaration of Independence. They then joined a crowd which toppled an
equestrian statue of King George III, decapitating his likeness in the process.
The 19,000 American colonials arriving in the city to prepare for the
revolution's next battle soon overtaxed its resources. Deprivation, disease,
and death became widespread even before 10,000 British troops arrived from
Boston by sea. Amidst all of this, Washington strategized the defense of New York.
But he still took time to oversee the placement of orders for fine china,
cutlery, and other luxury goods with loyalist merchants. Washington was
determined to set a "tolerably genteel table" throughout the war.1 This story exhibits uncanny parallels to one that unfolded an ocean away two
decades later.

In March
1793 at Kealakekua Bay, Kamehameha, king of the Island of Hawaiʻi,
spoke with Captain George Vancouver about his plans to conquer and unite all
the Hawaiian Islands into a sovereign state. Although Vancouver never saw a
battle between the 10,000-man armies aliʻi (chiefs) were
then putting on the field, widespread evidence of the deprivation, disease, and
death which he thought resulted from "the continued state of war that had so
long disgraced their islands" appalled him, and he offered to help broker a peace.2 The king and the captain exchanged gifts, including lessons in the British "art
of Cookery" for an attendant of Kamehameha. Before Vancouver set sail for
Northwest America, Kamehameha boarded his ships to ensure that "all" of his
guest's "wants" had been "gratified." He in turn accepted gifts of china and cutlery.
Having thus acquired "all requisites for the table, a tolerable Cook and every
kind of implement for culinary purposes," an officer of Vancouver noted, "The
Monarch boasted with pride and satisfaction that he should now live like King
George."3

Washington's
and Kamehameha's determination to live like King George while waging wars for unification
and independence suggests something about how separate struggles converged into
shared quests for sovereignty during the age of revolutions.4 Both men used fine china as a prop on the global stage to perform the civilized
statehood needed to secure belonging in the emergent world of nations.5 Such
performances captivated audiences, especially those European philosophers,
statesmen, and travelers who read the concurrent founding of the United States
(1776, 1783, 1789) and Hawaiʻi (1791, 1795, 1810) as separate dramas about the entwined
futures of republicanism and monarchy.6 Many of them cast these two emerging nations as exceptional states outside the
corruptions of history imperiling the Old World and at the vanguard of bold political
experiments in America and Oceania, twin New Worlds Europeans widely regarded
as "inventions" of Europe.7 Many further joined elite Hawaiians and Americans in positioning Hawaiʻi and
the U.S. at the summit of emergent Polynesian monarchies and American republics
as the states best poised to demonstrate the appeal and vitality of these forms
of government beyond European shores. This paper focuses on how the Native
state of Hawaiʻi developed in dynamic engagement with established
European states and the first independent American settler state and, in the
process, helped connect the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean worlds.8

Sovereignty
was difficult to obtain and to keep in the age of revolutions, when Europeans
labored to define and preside over an international law that increasingly distinguished
a small number of civilized states deemed worthy of nationhood from the large
number of those they viewed as less civilized and hence open to colonization or
recolonization.9 To take
and keep a place "among the powers of the earth," the United States, as well as
Hawaiʻi, needed Europeans to acknowledge them as "treaty-worthy nations;" this
meant, as Eliga Gould argues of the U.S. and was as true for Hawaiʻi, that "the
history they made was often the history that others were willing to let them
make."10

That
history meant stadial history, which Scottish Enlightenment theorists devised
to explain Britain's rise to commercial greatness, political genius, and global
power. They argued that societies progressed from savagery to civilization
through four stages: foraging, pastoralism, agriculture, and commercial and
civil society. They further tracked progress toward civilization by assessing
the development of property relations and social ranks, arts and industry,
manners and morals. Stadial theorists insisted that societies "behind" their "advanced"
European counterparts, like Hawaiʻi and the U.S.,
could progress by emulating civilized Europe and exceptional Britain but also,
crucially, through their own initiative.11 Still, ascending the ladder of civilization was not assured, and a given people
could stand on more than one rung at a time.

To wit, Europeans
widely believed that their brethren and descendants in America had degenerated intellectually,
morally, and physically, approaching savagery without relinquishing
civilization. At the same time, Europeans widely admired Hawaiians' advanced state
of civilization, although few relinquished their beliefs in Hawaiian savagery. Hence,
even ardent admirers used the future or conditional tense to describe Hawaiʻi and U.S. as exceptional states.12 Most located them, as the Welsh moral philosopher and American independence
supporter Richard Price did the United States, between "the savage and the refined"
stages of development.13 But most also held high hopes that each, as the Russian explorer V.M. Golovnin
said of Hawaiʻi, "would reach a state
of civilization unparalleled in history."14

White Americans
working first to secure and then to keep their independence, and Native Hawaiians
working to keep theirs, wrestled with the implications of Europeans locating
them between savagery and refinement. They did so at a time when performances
of Britishness and Englishness offered many of the world's peoples a way to claim
civilized status.15 White Americans
emulated the British to demonstrate their civilized standing and innovated to
forge a distinctive identity; "becoming American" meant defiantly but quite selectively
"unbecoming British."16 As rival European states cast imperial eyes on Hawaiʻi, Hawaiians continued
their work at unification and began to strategize how to remain independent;
they worked determinedly at becoming a singular Hawaiian people while quite selectively
becoming English.17 In the
process, Hawaiians built a transcultural monarchy on an indigenous foundation.
They designed this "hybrid nation-state," Kamanamaikalani Beamer argues, "as a
means to resist colonialism and to protect Native Hawaiian and national
interests."18

As elite Hawaiians
and Americans labored to live like King George, they adopted the free trade
Britain then preached but rarely practiced.19 Their material success enabled them to display their commercial prowess, as
well as to live like kings. In building states that aimed to showcase their
political genius, Hawaiians built a monarchy loosely modeled on George III and
the British monarchy, while Americans built a republic ostensibly in opposition
to them. Both secured a fragile independence marked by dependence and mimicry,
as well as singular potential. To understand how Hawaiians enlisted Westerners
in developing narratives of their unique promise and deployed them in pursuit
of cultural and political power requires starting with an account of how Hawaiian,
British, and American histories first converged during the age of revolutions.

Converging Revolutions
and Civilizations

In history
and historiography Europeans often appear to have imported the revolutionary
era from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is certainly true that Europeans'
experiences of the revolutionary Atlantic shaped how they sought to make sense
of and control Pacific Islanders.20 But the reverse is true too: Islanders' experiences of the revolutionary
Pacific shaped how they sought to make sense of and "manage Europeans."21 Hawaiians had been embroiled in political upheavals and wars long before 1778,
when they discovered Captain James Cook's ships off their shores and paddled
out to explore them.22 Hawaiians and other Polynesians did not join the revolutionary era after
encountering Britons and other Europeans. Rather, separate currents of
revolutionary change in the Pacific and Atlantic converged through
cross-cultural exchange.

In 1754 Kalaniʻōpuʻu united, or rather, reunited the Island of
Hawaiʻi and became its sole aliʻi-akua (god-king or divine king). Shortly
thereafter, he and Kahekili of Maui, kings of two most powerful polities of the
Hawaiian Islands, embroiled their people in an "almost perpetual state of war"
for the control of each other's territories and of the rich agricultural islands
to the west: Molokaʻi, Oʻahu, and Kauaʻi.23 Had Europeans visited Hawaiʻi in 1754, or the century leading up to it, they would
have witnessed the development of divine kingship and strict social classes and
watched aliʻi-akua grapple with climate- and human-induced agricultural crises,
project their power through ever costlier wars, and consolidate their territory
into ever larger polities. They might have concluded that these aspects of recent
Hawaiian history bore more than a passing resemblance to their own. Some might even
have seen mid-18th century imperial wars and rivalries between Hawaiʻi and Maui as analogous to those between Britain and France.24

1754 was
also the year that the French and Indian War began in North America; it sparked
the broader Seven Year's War (1756–1763). A transoceanic war waged around the
Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the South China Sea, the Seven Year's War marks
the beginning of the age of revolutions.25 In response to the military-fiscal crisis engendered by that war, European
monarchs imposed political and fiscal discipline on their colonies in the
Atlantic, and Britain and France extended their rivalry to the Pacific, where
they sought new colonial and commercial opportunities. Growing tensions between
European empires and their colonies fueled Enlightenment thinkers' critiques of
empire. Imperial critics questioned the savagery of indigenous people, the
morality of settler colonial projects rooted in native destruction and
dispossession, and the ability of imperial powers to keep settler colonies
loyal and dependent. 26 This
led some to conceive of forging friendships with indigenous peoples either as an
alternative to or as a new method of imperialism.27

As
relations between Britain and its North American colonies deteriorated after
the Seven Year's War, moral critics and pragmatic agents of empire alike envisioned
future relations with Pacific Islanders as an antidote to the revolutionary
storms brewing in the Atlantic. In the Pacific volumes the Scottish
hydrographer, Alexander Dalrymple, published in 1770 and 1771, he asserted that
finding and establishing trade with Terra
Australis Incognito, the Great Unknown Southern Continent that Europeans
believed must lie in the Pacific, would enable Britain to resolve problems with
its North American colonists and prevent the escalation of their righteous struggle
against tyranny into war.28 Sailing with Captain Cook on his second Pacific voyage (1772–1775) in search of
this fabled continent, naturalist George Forster mused that a "future age, when
the maritime powers of Europe lose their American colonies," might make it
"possible for Europeans to have humanity enough to acknowledge the indigenous
tribes of the South Seas as their brethren" and to have "settlements which
would not be defiled with the blood of innocent nations."29 Cook disproved the existence of the Southern Continent on his second Pacific
voyage. He then accepted the command of a third voyage to find a Northwest
Passage long believed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific. Before he set sail,
the Admiralty reaffirmed trade, not settlement, as the most promising strategy
for promoting harmonious relations between Europeans and Polynesians like
Tahitians, whom Europeans then regarded as the Pacific's most civilized people
and those most capable of further ascent on the ladder of civilization.

Cook departed
Plymouth in July 1776, a week after Americans declared their independence and
four months after publication of The
Wealth of Nations. He sailed, Bernard Smith argues, as a "global agent" of
Adam Smith, charged with showing that the British did not seek to conquer the
Pacific but to promote mutually beneficial friendship and trade there. But by his
third voyage, Cook had become disillusioned by the contradictions inherent in
his mission to spread European civilization to ostensibly less civilized
peoples. For example, his efforts to open trade often engendered violence,
while exchanges of iron for sex expedited the spread of venereal disease.30 To further complicate matters, Anne Salmond argues, having spent years in the
Pacific, the officers and men who had sailed with Cook before, and even more so
Cook himself, "were no longer purely European;" they "had come under Polynesian
influence."31

Over Cook's
first two visits to the Hawaiian Islands in January 1778 and the following year,
Britons and Hawaiians developed admiration and respect for each other, perhaps
starting with each other's maritime skills. Recognizing Hawaiians as
linguistically and culturally related to other Polynesians who had explored and
settled the vast region from Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the south, Rapa Nui (Easter
Island) in the east, and Hawaiʻi in the north, Cook was awestruck that what he
deemed "by far the most extensive nation on earth" was even larger than he had
previously thought.32 Hawaiians had potent memories of their epic voyages of exploration and
settlement; they and Britons may have recognized their first meeting as one
between "two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history."33 Stadial theorists thought maritime skill a hallmark of civilization, as they did
social and political ranks. Even more than elsewhere in Polynesia, Hawaiians
and Britons found each other's social hierarchies and power structures mutually
intelligible.34 Indeed,
Britons thought that "there seemed to be true kings" in Hawaiʻi.35 Clothing not only enabled chiefs and officers, commoners and men to identify
each other but served as a sign of advanced civilization. Britons read the
magnificent feather cloaks aliʻi wore as a testament to their organization of
the surpluses that supported the rise of divine kings, hereditary ranks, and a
complex division of laborers producing the finest arts and goods.36 Cook's surgeon thought "a more rich or elegant Dress than this, perhaps the
Arts of Europe have not yet been able to supply."37 Moreover, Patrick Kirch observes, when Cook met Kalaniʻōpuʻu, he encountered a
kingship that seemed familiar to him: "King George III, to whom Cook had been
introduced at Buckingham Palace, basked in the fading aura of divine kingship
even as the 'divine right of kings' would soon be tested in revolutions across
Europe. But in far-off Hawaiʻi, divine kingship was
still ascendant."38 Cook
experienced something of its power himself.

When he
first sailed into Kealakekua Bay in January 1779, Hawaiians in 1,500 canoes
came to greet him.
When he went ashore, ordinary people prostrated themselves in his presence,
while priests addressed him as the akua Lono, met him with chants and
offerings, and honored him in ceremonies. Kalaniʻōpuʻu
and Cook exchanged names and regalia, including a resplendent feather cloak
that the former draped over the latter's shoulders, linking the captain to the
king's highest genealogical lines and ancestor gods. In the process, Anne
Salmond explains, Cook "acquired part of his mana or
power;" in exchanging names, "their life forces were mingled."39 Throughout the third voyage, tension and violence had plagued Cook's relations
with his men, as well as those with islanders, far more than on the previous
two. His men interpreted his relationship with Kalaniʻōpuʻu
as further proof that their captain had elevated the interests of Polynesians and
his relationships with the aliʻi he befriended over theirs.40

On his
third, unexpected visit to Hawaiʻi in February 1779, Cook died after a series of misinterpretations
and violent events with his men, which undercut his authority over them, and
with Hawaiians, which led them to steal a cutter and Cook to attempt to take Kalaniʻōpuʻu
hostage. By the time Hawaiians fatally attacked Cook, his men's ability to save
him had collapsed along with his command.41 It seemed Cook had utterly failed his mission to transplant to the Pacific a new-and-improved
version of what Kathleen Wilson calls "the once-glittering vision of a free and
virtuous empire, founded in consent and nurtured in liberty and trade," a
vision that became ever more "tarnished" as the American war continued in the
Atlantic.42

Cook's
death immediately engendered anger and violence between Britons and Hawaiians, but
the grief they shared soon afterwards helped renew mutual bonds of admiration
at once selfless and self-interested. By the time the British departed, Hawaiians
had assumed in their imagination the place long held by Tahitians. Lieutenant
James King wrote, "If Otaheite is call'd the Queen of the So sea Isles…, Owhyhee may be termed the King of the So sea, & these Islands the
most capable of being made useful." The Admiralty sanctioned this view in its
official account of Cook's last voyage, published in 1784. Although it hoped Cook
was mistaken in asserting that the long-sought Northwest Passage did not exist,
the Admiralty attributed to the navigator an assessment of Hawaiʻi
in fact written by its editor: "a discovery, which though the last, seemed, in
many respects, to be the most important that had hitherto been made by
Europeans, throughout the extent of the Pacific Ocean."43 Hawaiians soon reciprocated the British view. When Kalaniʻōpuʻu's
nephew, Kamehameha, became king of Hawaiʻi Island in 1791, he led the way in treating
Britain as Hawaiians' most important discovery and Britons as the foreigners
most capable of being made useful to Hawaiʻi.

Kamehameha
was not yet famous when he and Cook met, nor were the midshipman, George Vancouver,
and the marine, John Ledyard, who served on Cook's final voyage, when Hawaiian,
British, and American histories first converged. Each man secured fame, in part
by deploying memories of Cook that put the glitter back on competing versions
of Britain's free and virtuous empire and aimed to advance Native and Western imperial
projects in the Pacific.44 Kamehameha, to whom his uncle had bequeathed both the akua of war, Ku, and
something of the life force of Cook, stepped into the explorer's shoes as a
global agent of Adam Smith based in an island kingdom that soon earned the
reputation, "crossroads of the Pacific." He also enlisted Vancouver in forging
a transoceanic "royal fraternity" with "his brother" King George to become
monarch of a united and sovereign Hawaiʻi recognized and
respected as such on the world stage.45 Vancouver stepped into Cook's shoes as the commander of the Pacific voyage
(1791–1795) on which he confirmed Cook's view that the Northwest Passage did
not exist and purportedly negotiated a consensual cession of the Hawaiian
Islands to Britain. Finally, if far less dramatically, the American colonial
Ledyard proclaimed the importance of Hawaiʻi to the
United States in unofficial account of Cook's final voyage published in 1783. Just
as British restrictions on U.S. trade in the West Indies plunged the newly
minted nation into depression, Ledyard's visions of the vast riches to be made
trading sea otter pelts from Northwest America to China, with Hawaiʻi as this trade's pivot, inspired some of his
countrymen to seek their fortune in the Pacific.46 Hawaiians, along with Britons and Americans, transformed Hawaiʻi into what
French explorer C.P. Claret Fleurieu called the "great caravansary" of the
world's largest ocean.47

"An Asylum for All
Nations"

Literacy
and print culture gave Americans an advantage over Hawaiians in broadcasting
their progress toward civilization, but hardly a decisive one. Hawaiians gained
access to the international republic of letters through cross-cultural
performances. British traveler John Turnbull praised Kamehameha's "genius and
spirit of enterprise in creating resources which did not exist before."48 He included among these resources, Nicholas Thomas argues, a skill at
"commanding a narrative, purveying a certain interpretation of events, and
maintaining its salience."49 Kamehameha drew upon a vast store of knowledge of the world acquired from native
and foreign explorers and advisors.50 Deploying this knowledge to communicate Hawaiian aims and achievements from the
Pacific to the Atlantic in accounts written by the Western visitors he
cultivated, Kamehameha soon "attracted the attention of all of Europe."51

By the time
Kamehameha and Vancouver met again in Hawaiʻi in 1793
in their then-new respective ranks of king and captain, "the struggles between
rival chiefs [had] assumed epic proportions unmatched elsewhere in the Pacific
at the end of the eighteenth century."52 Off the battlefield, Hawaiian kings and chiefs competed for foreign goods,
trading, raiding, and even capturing ships and killing crew (Westerners also engaged
in such practices). Kahekili, who by the 1780s controlled Maui, Oʻahu, and Molokaʻi, acquired foreign goods by all viable
means. By century's end, Kamehameha consolidated his power over most of the
Islands and commanded respect for Hawaiian sovereignty abroad. Honest and
peaceful trade constituted one pillar of his success.53 Visiting the Hawaiian Islands in 1792 Vancouver found supplies scanty and
prices exorbitant at most of them. But when he sailed into Kealakekua Bay in
1793 for his first formal state visit with Kamehameha, canoes accompanying the welcoming
royal armada delivered such a profusion of pigs and produce that his ships could
scarcely accommodate the bounty.54

Americans
envisioned free trade as part of their broader struggle against the tyranny of
King George and British monopoly.55 By contrast, Kamehameha embraced it as part of a strategy by which the king
sought to forge closer relations with George III and secure recognition of
Hawaiian sovereignty on the world stage. On the one hand, Kamehameha guaranteed
free and honest trade and security to foreigners sojourning in his domains. On
the other hand, starting with Vancouver, he provisioned emissaries of King
George and the British Admiralty gratis.
Edward Bell, clerk aboard a consort ship of Vancouver's expedition, explained:
"Kamehameha acts as ship's purveyor…for he had taken in great measure upon
himself the supplying of both vessels, declaring that as they belonged to King
George, they must not in his dominions traffic for refreshments like other
vessels, but be supplied during their stay with whatever they stood in the most
liberal way."56 Kamehameha
thereby advanced multiple agendas. As he restricted rival aliʻi's
access to Vancouver, the king bolstered his standing with the captain, who
henceforth paid "principle court" to Kamehameha "as king of the whole island,"
according lesser chiefs the "degree of respect and attention" their lower status
warranted. Kamehameha's largess conveyed to Britons and rival chiefs his power
to command the resources of Hawaiʻi.57 His conspicuous displays of generosity furthermore underscored the king's
nobility and his kingdom's commitment to a law of nations which recognized
hospitality as a right.58 Kamehameha's policies confirmed Kealakekua Bay as the preferred port of call
for foreigners and designated refreshment spot for ships of the British Royal
Navy and "his brother," King George III.

On his
final departure from Kealakekua Bay in 1794 Vancouver reflected on "the
memorable spot where Captain Cook unfortunately fell a sacrifice to his undaunted
and enterprising spirit;" despite "that melancholy instance," it had "proved an
asylum, where the hospitable reception, and friendly treatment were such as
could not have been surpassed by the most enlightened nation on earth."59 Of Vancouver's many invocations of Cook, this one held a message Kamehameha was
eager to send across the Atlantic: in relations with foreigners, the king had taken up the enterprising spirit which Cook had bequeathed to Kalaniʻopuʻu and his successor.

Kahekili
died in 1794. Through war and diplomacy, Kamehameha took control of Maui, Oʻahu, and Molokaʻi the following year. After a deadly
outbreak of imported disease, possibly typhoid, forced him to abort his plans
for unifying all the Islands by conquering Kauaʻi in
1804, Kamehameha turned to consolidating victory through peace (Kaumualiʻi
peacefully surrendered Kauaʻi and Niʻihau to Kamehameha in 1810, completing the
unification of the Hawaiian Islands).60 This included extending free trade and security throughout all his realms, much
to the delight of foreigners. Russian explorer Urey Lisiansky repeatedly lauded
Hawaiians' "honesty and hospitality."61 British sailor Archibald Campbell proclaimed that Kamehameha's "strict rules of
justice" made visitors as "safe in his port as in those of any civilized
nation.62 Kamehameha's success at making "my Islands an asylum for all nations" elicited
glowing Western commentary about Hawaiians' progress under his rule and
worthiness for belonging in the family of nations.63

Two
visitors Kamehameha temporarily attached to his royal household astutely chronicled
his consolidation of peace and rebuilding of war-ravaged Oʻahu,
where Kamehameha moved in 1804 and where Honolulu succeeded Kealakekua Bay as
foreigners' preferred port-of-call: Campbell, who worked as a sail-maker for
the king from 1809 to 1810, and William Shaler, a U.S. captain and fur trader
who visited in 1803 and 1805, the second time as the king's guest.

Shaler dramatically
synthesized Western views of Hawaiʻi's development under
Kamehameha. This "extremely popular" and talented king was "endeavoring to restore
prosperity to his islands" after "many political revolutions," especially recent
wars and famines which had "destroyed one-third of the population."64 (Shaler ignored the key role disease played in this great dying, perhaps
because his ship likely brought typhoid in 1803.65)
Kamehameha revitalized agriculture, which Hawaiians had brought to "an
incredible degree of perfection" before recent wars; soon, fields "enclosed by
stone walls" once again lent "an exquisitely beautiful appearance to the
country."66 Shaler
admired the "great ingenuity and taste" of Hawaiian manufactures from their "inimitably
well executed" canoes to ordinary goods like "their excellent white cordage;
for running rigging there is no better rope."67

While he
found the government "a strange mix of despotism, aristocracy, and liberty,"
Shaler approved of a recent decline in despotism and restrictions that made
nobles "masters of their vassals, but not of their liberty." This sophisticated
"balance of rights" and an equally refined "political distribution" of land had
enabled Hawaiians to achieve "a very considerable degree of perfection in the
science of government."68 Although they had "no regular body of law," by which he and other Westerners
meant written law, "private property, the basis of civil government is clearly
defined and acknowledged."69 This recognition was as widespread as it was important. Private property and
agriculture provided Hawaiians with a powerful claim under international law for
recognition of title to their land; they further denoted a society's high
position on the civilizational ladder.70 Stadial thinkers, moreover, regarded commerce and industry as generative of
progress, for which they found additional evidence in Kamehameha's project to
construct a fleet of Western-style ships.

Vancouver helped
launch this program as a result of his first and unsuccessful attempt to
negotiate a cession of Hawaiʻi to Britain. Kamehameha
agreed on the condition that Vancouver leave him an armed warship. When Vancouver,
who refused to traffic in arms, declined, Kamehameha asked: how "could it be
expected the Owhyeeans would fight with firmness for their Country if they had
imprudently given it away to those who would not protect it?"71 His pointed question abruptly ended further discussion of a cession on that
visit. But Vancouver directed his men to help Hawaiians start construction of
the first Western-style vessel built in Hawaiʻi, the Beretane (Britain). Soon, Hawaiians'
interest in and import of iron tools and ship designs, wrote Shaler, "furnished
them with new…channels for their industry and ingenuity, they…have built
several vessels, without any foreign aid."72 The skilled Hawaiians blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, and sail-makers with whom
Campbell worked did "their work as perfectly as [the] Europeans" who taught
them Western ways of ship-building and other "useful arts." Like Shaler, he
admired Hawaiians' "rapid progress toward civilization," their "great ingenuity
in all their arts and manufactures" and their "persevering industry."73 For this Shaler was personally grateful. After his leaking brig limped from
China to Hawaiʻi, Kamehameha offered him "my choice of vessel in exchange for
my ship and promised to equip the [45-ton schooner] I chose in the best manner
possible."74 By
1810, Kamehameha possessed around thirty Hawaiian-built, Western style ships
and had sold or traded others to foreigners like Shaler.75 Europeans and Americans lauded the progress Hawaiians had made before encounters
with the West and apparent ease with which they were advancing commerce,
industry, and government in engagement with the West. Hawaiians' progress toward
civilization appeared far more rapid than that which Adam Smith and J. Hector
St. John de Crèvecoeur had attributed to Britain's North American colonists in
the century before their independence, fueling faith that kingdom and republic
alike were well on the way toward fulfillment of their unique promise.76

While
Vancouver hoped that Britain would benefit most from Kamehameha's friendship
and trade policies, broader British policy provided Americans with the advantage,
and they became Hawaiʻi's leading trading partner early in the nineteenth
century.77 Although U.S. historians long presented and some still present Honolulu as "the
first capital of America's Pacific frontier," interdependence describes the
Hawaiian and U.S. relationship in the late 18th and early 19th centuries better than incipient imperialism.78 The furs from Northwest America and sandalwood from Hawaiʻi U.S. traders sold
to China, as well as the goods they traded between California and Hawaiʻi,
depended on a dizzying array of Hawaiian food, goods, security, services, and
labor.79 Even as foreign trade helped Kamehameha secure wealth and extend his power over
all Hawaiʻi, U.S. trade with and through Hawaiʻi provided it with a measure of
commercial independence that helped offset its continued economic dependence on
Great Britain. Their commercial relationship, moreover, enabled American and
Hawaiian elites to display in abundance the luxury Chinese and British goods
that were hallmarks of a transoceanic modernity and to profess cultural parity
with their European counterparts, bolstering the reputations of Hawaiʻi and the U.S. as polite and refined commercial and
civil societies on the make. But it was in portrayals of the building the
Hawaiian monarchy and U.S. republic that their statesmen labored to demonstrate
the popularity and vitality of these modes of government beyond European shores
and to stake claims to political genius.

Entangled
Exceptionalisms

Elite Hawaiians
and their white American counterparts, along with European sympathizers and
supporters of each, developed narratives of their political exceptionalism, respectively
in intimate identification with and outward rejection of King George III and
the British monarchy. They did so at a time when the British were revising
their own exceptionalist narratives as they revitalized their monarchy
following their demoralizing defeat by the North American colonists and the
devastating loss of Captain Cook.80 British, Hawaiian, and American exceptionalisms of the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries were entangled productions, all having deep roots in
performances of Englishness and Britishness.81

Indeed, a
key problem with transatlantic efforts to fashion the U.S. republic as the
"cause of all mankind" is that so many Western contemporaries regarded Britain
as the standard-bearer of liberty, progress, and prosperity and, with a
constitution that divided power among king, lord, and commons, a model of
republican government, on which the U.S. modeled its own with its president,
senate, and congress.82 After their "symbolic regicide" of George III and violent revolution against
his alleged corruption and despotism, U.S. Americans cast George as the
"antitype" of their virtuous founding fathers.83 This move proved pivotal to ongoing efforts to cast the virtuous U.S. republic,
its free citizens, and their liberties in diametric opposition to Britain's
tyrannical monarch and servile subjects, but it nonetheless entailed, Peter
Onuf argues, "less a rejection of 'Britain' than an imaginative substitution of
'America' for Britain" in narratives of civilizational progress that promised
degenerate Europe and Europeans regeneration in America.84 "Unbecoming British" in order to become American paradoxically involved white Americans
becoming more British by embracing the rights of Englishmen that they denied to
American Indians, free blacks, and slaves. They thereby sought to situate
themselves, their nation, and "empire of liberty" at the center of historical
change, rather than the periphery.85

In life,
but even more so in death, Captain Cook offered Hawaiians potent material for
narrating, and Britons for revising, ideas about their exceptionalism, which
both worked to their advantage. When the news of Cook's death reached England
in January 1780, King George reportedly wept, and his subjects and Cook's
patrons mourned his loss.86The Morning Standard lamented Cook's "murder" as "not only a national loss, but a
misfortune in which all Europe must feel itself deeply interested."87 And in fact, Europe was. In Austria, France, Russia, and elsewhere, Europeans
mourned the death of Cook and honored him as a hero, a humble man who rose
through the ranks by merit, a captain and navigator without parallel in
history, and an icon of the Enlightenment.88 Still, for all this pan-European internationalism, Cook and his memories were especially
put in service of English nationalism. Kathleen Wilson shows that in poetry,
prose, paintings, and plays, "he was heralded as a particularly English hero who embodied and extended
his country's genius for navigation and discovery, aptitude for science,
respect for merit, love of liberty, and paternalistic regard for humanity." Amidst
a national and imperial crisis, the Great Navigator's achievements as an
emissary of George III helped Britons "recuperate British political and
imperial authority, rescue the national reputation for liberty and restore
faith in the superiority of the English national character."89

Britons and
other Europeans, if not Hawaiians, immortalized Cook and accorded him something
like divinity.90 As Rod
Edmond observes, "Most striking is the European need for a godly Cook."91 The Admiralty officially endorsed this view in its lavish account of Cook's
final voyage, but it took its most spectacular popular form in the hit
pantomime, Omai: or a Trip around the
World, first staged at the Theatre Royale, Covent Garden, in 1785 at
Christmas.92 In the
final scene, a magnificent painting, The
Apotheosis of Captain Cook, descended to the stage, on which the martyred
Cook, holding a sextant rather than a sword, reposed on the clouds above
Kealakeakua Bay as he was crowned by Britannia and Fame. The painting came to
rest behind and somewhat above a crowd of adoring mourners: the just enthroned
Tahitian king Omai, his new British wife Londina, European sailors from many
nations, and Native ambassadors from the fifteen countries Cook visited. An
"English Captain" sang a lament for Cook, "He came and he saw not to
conquer but save," and to the assembled Native chiefs who "prove [their]
humanity" by mourning the great navigator.93 Britons'
and Europeans' veneration of Cook in some ways dovetailed with that of
Hawaiians, providing them common ground at Kealakekua Bay, which became the
principal place of pilgrimage where Europeans and Hawaiians gathered to honor
his memory.

Figure 2: John Webber, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. Courtesy of the British Museum.

European
accounts of their and Hawaiians' mutual veneration of Cook marked these
pilgrimages.94 Joshua
Lee Dimsdell, who visited in 1792, encapsulated a wide range of homages that Europeans
recorded Hawaiians paying Cook: "There are a Variety of Morais built to his
Memory & the Natives sacrifice to him in Common wither their other
Deities—it is their firm Hope and Belief that he will come again & forgive
them. He is never mentioned but with the utmost reverence & Respect…[His bones] are preserved as Relics."95 As Galaup de la Pérouse approached the Hawaiian Islands in 1786, the French
navigator wrote about Cook, "I shall always regard him as the first among
navigators." La Pérouse, whose ships disappeared two years later, could not
bring himself to visit Kealakekeua Bay because of his "regret at the loss of so
great a man." Instead, his went to Maui, where finding found Hawaiians "gentle
and considerate," he pondered the circumstances of Cook's death, wondering "whether
some imprudent action of his part did not, in some way, compel the inhabitants
of Owhyee to have recourse to a
justified defence."96 Hawaiians' and Europeans' sharing of memories of Cook at Kealakekua Bay enabled
them to find reconciliation and forge friendship. Moreover, in both killing and mourning Captain Cook,
Hawaiians acquired a transoceanic authority comparable to that the North
American colonists did by militarily defeating mighty Britain.

Indeed, the
Hawaiian killing of Cook, Marshall Sahlins argues, "became a novel source of
legitimation for Hawaiian kings," starting with the dynastic founder,
Kamehameha.97 He
incorporated Cook's bones into the rituals of his power and made the Union Jack,
which flew from his dwellings and his ships (until Hawaiians designed a flag of
their own which contained a diminutive Union Jack), a symbol of his authority.98 Kamehameha publicly linked his policy of protecting foreign ships to Cook's
death, according to Bell of the Vancouver expedition, "it his most solemn
determination…to do everything he can to make their stay among them
comfortable—he laments in the most pathetic terms the death of Captain Cook,
and seems to hold his memory in the utmost veneration."99 Britons reciprocated by investing in the future of Hawaiʻi. Although Vancouver
secured a consensual "cession" of Hawaiʻi to Britain in 1794, Hawaiians did not
cede their sovereignty to the British.100 Nor did British government use his treaty to assert claims to the Hawaiian
Islands. The Russian explorer Golovnin, who visited Hawaiʻi
in 1818, offers perhaps the most insightful contemporary account of Vancouver's
treaty in theory and practice:

[T]he Sandwich
Islanders consider it an agreement of friendship and assistance or, to use our
terminology, a defensive alliance…Tameamea promised to protect English
nationals…by supplying them with provisions free of charge, while the English
took it upon themselves the obligation to defend him from the attacks of other
Europeans. As to their right of ownership and independence, the Sandwich
Islanders never even dreamed of parting with them. In any case, it would be
hard to believe in the possibility of such a submission."101

Britain, indeed, wielded its global power and authority to
compel rival empires to respect Hawaiian sovereignty, as Kamehameha cultivated
a relationship to British mana, especially George III and employed British advisors,
ideas, goods, and ships to do likewise. His harnessing of the mana of "his loving Brother King George" to
secure recognition of and respect for the sovereignty of a Hawaiʻi just
achieving unification compares to Americans deploying the 'rights of Englishmen'
to secure recognition of the United States before they even existed as a state.102

The British-Hawaiian
relationship proved important, for Kamehameha confronted internal and external
threats to his power throughout his reign (1795–1819). In his later years,
powerful aliʻi formulated plans to assert their power
once Kamehameha died, while Russians in the form of Georg Anton Shäffer, a
naturalist and agent of Alexander Baranov and his Russian-American Fur Company,
threatened the sovereignty of the Hawaiian Islands. Kamehameha initially welcomed
Shäffer to Oʻahu but was outraged when the Russian began
to build a fort on land Kamehameha provided him and raised the Russian flag
over it. Shäffer prudently departed for Kauaʻi, where
he allied with Kaumualiʻi, who remained a powerful rival of Kamehameha. The two
schemed to secure Russian protection over Kauaʻi and
Niʻihau.103

So, it is
not surprising that when the Russian warship, Rurik, arrived at Hawaiʻi Island in
November 1816 to meet Kamehameha, it was met by 400 Hawaiians armed with muskets
stationed on shore, with one of the king's warships standing at the ready.104 The situation was tense. But the Rurik's captain, Otto von Kotzebue, succeeded in convincing Kamehameha that he was an
emissary of the Russian emperor on a peaceful voyage of scientific discovery. Kamehameha
then welcomed the Rurik's officers
and the emperor they represented into
a royal fraternity first forged with King George not as "Russians" but as "sons
and descendants of Cook and his friend Vancouver" (undoubtedly flattering the
Russians, who modeled their nineteenth-century voyages of exploration on Cook's).105 As such, Kamehameha extended to the Russian ship of exploration the same
courtesies he did those of the British Royal Navy. Kotzebue's naturalist, the
French-born former Prussian lieutenant Adelbert von Chamisso, reported, "We
were not merchants, and he would not be one toward us. He would care for our
needs completely free of charge. We did not have to give the king a present,
unless we wished. This was Tammeiameia, king of the Sandwich Islands."106 Later a British advisor of the king showed Kotzebue and Chamisso a letter from
King George to "His Majesty," Kamehameha. It "clearly shows" that "Tamaahmaah
is recognized as a real king by the English," leading the captain to do
likewise.107 The
skill with which Kamehameha transformed potential enemies into privileged guests dependent on his largess forever impressed upon
Chamisso the nobility of Hawaiians.

Viewing aliʻi's ongoing, as well as Shäffer's recent, threats to
Kamehameha's sovereignty through the lenses of contemporary European politics,
Kotzebue and Chamisso took great interest in the future of the Hawaiʻi,
especially in the future event of Kamehameha's death. Kotzebue approved of how
Kamehameha was grooming his son as his successor, noting, "Tamaahmaah has
ordered this from political motives, that no revolution may arise after his
death."108 For
Kotzebue, this was a matter of international as well as national importance at
a dangerous moment in the age of revolutions and given the importance of Hawaiʻi as the most civilized state in and commercial
crossroads of the Pacific. Hence, he enjoined "the English" to "take care that,
after Tahaahmaah's death, a sensible man succeed, and every revolution be
avoided."109 As
Harry Liebersohn observes of Kotzebue's commentary, "Avoid revolution: in the
aftermath of Napoleon statesmen everywhere could agree to this."110 Chamisso shared Kotzebue's fears about what would happen to the Hawaiian
government after Kamehameha's death, but he was certain it would not involve
the loss of Hawaiian sovereignty: "This people will not subject itself to
foreigners, and they are too strong, too numerous, and too fond of warfare to
be quickly extirpated, like the natives of the Marianas."111

Kotzebue
and Chamisso joined other influential European travelers in exploring how the
Hawaiian monarchy governed according to what were fast becoming universal
standards of benevolence and enlightenment.112 They compared life, liberty, and happiness in the Atlantic and the Pacific as represented,
in Kotzebue's words, by Kamehameha's "wise government," which has "acquired
permanent glory."113 While, for example, Kotzebue admired Kamehameha's Western-style "houses of
stone," he read the king's preference for entertaining his guests in his "straw
palace" and residing in "straw houses" as evidence that "he only wishes to
increase the happiness and not the wants of his subjects."114 Chamisso found that happiness pervaded social relations, injecting a measure of
equality into a deeply hierarchical society to the benefit of political
stability. In one of several episodes, he recounted how Hawaiians observing his
lame attempt to swim across a stream, "even though I can't really swim,"
regaled him with "incessant peals of laughter." Chamisso remarked, "But
laughter here does not contain anything hostile in it. Laugher is a person's
right; everybody laughs at everybody else, king or commoner, without detriment
to their other relationships."115 In this Chamisso found a magnanimity and equality like that of carnival in
Europe of yore, which dissolved "the pretensions and anxieties of high and low
alike" and in which he found a common fellowship and humanity that crossed
oceans.116 Where
there was happiness in Hawaiʻi, there was also life and liberty, a trinity that
North Americans declaring their independence in 1776 had claimed as their
special preserve.

In 1795
Kamehameha's trusted English advisor, John Young, told a U.S. visitor, "twas at
Owhyhee…that peace & contentment seem'd to go hand in hand…poverty was a
stranger, in this land of liberty; and Slavery was a term, they did not
understand."117 Whereas the early Atlantic revolutions framed Young's contrast of liberty in
Hawaiʻi and America, the Napoleonic era framed Chamisso's reflection on the
absence of slavery and serfdom: in Hawaiʻi, "a man is free—he can be killed but
he cannot be sold or imprisoned." Chamisso also found there nobility "the way I imagined it used to exist among us," before it could be
"given and taken away," which "is no nobility." In Hawaiʻi,
"le gentilhomme" remains: "true
nobility,…such as no king can bestow, and no Napoleon can stamp out."118 Through Kamehameha's masterful synthesis of liberty and nobility, happiness and
hierarchy, prosperity and order, modernity and tradition, Hawaiʻi came, Harry
Liebersohn argues, "to symbolize monarchy itself," at the same time that the
United States came to symbolize republicanism.119

Over his
three Pacific voyages, Cook disproved the existence of
the Great Southern Continent, which Europeans long believed a necessary counter-weight
to the Eurasian landmass, and of the Northwest Passage, long believed to
connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But later European travelers imagined
that their dreams of the Great Southern Continent and Northwest Passage had
been realized in Hawaiʻi. As Hawaiians and Westerners
made Hawaiʻi a crossroads of the Atlantic and Pacific, it came to serve as a
Northwest Passage. The Hawaiian monarchy, along with its Tahitian and Tongan
counterparts in the Pacific, provided European monarchies with a counterweight
to the U.S. republic, along with its American and European counterparts in the
Atlantic, balancing the political world much as the Great Southern Continent
was said to have kept the physical earth in equilibrium. During the age of
revolutions, the entangled exceptionalisms of Hawaiʻi,
the United States, and Britain could be expressed in a regional and developmental
analogy: Hawaiʻi was to Oceania, as the U.S. was to the Americas, as Britain was
to Europe. Hawaiians leveraged these beliefs to secure and maintain their
national sovereignty from the late-eighteenth century until the very end of the
nineteenth, during which time most of the world came under Western imperial
rule.

Conclusion

In the
late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries Hawaiians and white Americans
labored to build united and sovereign states, recognized and respected as such
by Europeans. These two fledgling nations were similarly weak, struggling for
survival on the home front and on the world stage. Then, Hawaiʻi
and the U.S. could at times only make the kinds of history that Europeans were
willing to let them make. Stadial histories, which sought to explain the
historical development of civilized Europe in general and exceptional Britain
in particular, provided elite Hawaiians and their white American counterparts
with an opening each used to develop narratives of their own nation's exceptionalism.
The narratives of both were inextricably bound up with, as it were, the British
original. And it worked. Hawaiians and Americans cultivated beliefs in their
unique promise to secure Western recognition of and respect for their
sovereignty.

Hawaiian
and U.S. efforts to sustain their sovereignty, however, involved a difficult balancing
act, as they found themselves poised between independence and dependence. Each,
for example, came to serve, in different ways, as commercial linchpins in the
expanding economy of the Pacific. Their centrality to the transpacific trade
and embrace of free trade policies contributed to each's sense of its economic
importance and commercial prowess. In respectively building an esteemed
monarchy and esteemed republic, Hawaiians and Americans demonstrated the
popularity and vitality of these forms of government beyond European shores.
This contributed to each's sense of its political importance and political
genius. Still, the debts both owed to Britain for their forms of government and
commercial success seem to have lent a palpable sense of fragility to
Hawaiians' and Americans' sense of empowerment, which depended on maintaining relations
with others, particularly Great Britain, that were often characterized by mimicry
and dependence. In these ways, the rhetoric of Hawaiian and American exceptionalism
derived from a sense of tentative power, of precarious centrality.120

Moreover, American
and Hawaiian exceptionalisms proved to be double-edged swords. European beliefs
in them bolstered Hawaiʻi's and the United States'
claims to treaty worthiness and helped them secure and keep a place in the world
of nations in the tumultuous decades following Britain's formal recognition of
the United States in 1783 and in the many decades both before and after Britain,
France, and the U.S. signed treaties formally recognizing the Hawaiian Kingdom
in 1843 (when the Marquesas, New Zealand, and Tahiti came under European
colonial rule). Elite white Americans' determination to secure and keep their
sovereignty and claim "the rights of Englishmen" as their special preserve
facilitated their broader and deeper desires and abilities to limit the
political power and rights of ordinary whites and to deny them to nonwhites as
they undertook the conquest of the North American continent and overseas
territories. Hawaiians' determination to secure and keep their sovereignty at
times led them to embrace pejorative and racist views and to engage in acts of imperial
aggression against other Pacific Islanders and American Indians.121 Later in the nineteenth century, shared experiences of colonialism facilitated
Hawaiians' identification with American Indians. With the overthrow of the Hawaiian
Kingdom in 1893 and U.S. annexation in 1898, David Chang argues, Hawaiians'
identifications and "comparisons with other colonized people became more
powerful and geographically expansive." Still, "[i]t took imaginative power"
for Hawaiians "to understand themselves to be like Indians" and other colonized
peoples.122

Late-eighteenth
and early-nineteenth century Europeans travelers and others recognized, as
later historians did not, that the new Native state of Hawaiʻi emerged
alongside and in engagement with established and new states in the Atlantic
World, and that its history shaped and was shaped by the revolutionary era.
This is an important story in its own right. It may also help scholars and
teachers continue to revise accounts of the American Revolution, the importance
of which, as Michelle Burnham so aptly puts it, "has been so magnified,
mythologized, and multiplied that it has made it difficult to see late
eighteenth century America in a truly global, transnational context."123 The magnification of the American Revolution long worked to diminish the
importance of and attention paid to revolutions elsewhere in the Americas; so
too, until fairly recently, did the magnification of the importance of North
Atlantic political, industrial, and other revolutions diminish the importance
of and attention paid to revolutionary processes and projects elsewhere in the
world.124 Study
of the age of revolutions in world history, moreover, has just begun to include,
in Ben Finney's words, the "other one-third of the globe" that is the Pacific
Ocean world.125 But, the
age of revolutions was not a foreign import to the Pacific; there, as
elsewhere, cross-cultural exchanges and relationships facilitated the
convergence of previously separate currents of revolutionary change.

Acknowledgement

I thank Michelle Burnham, Larry Gross, Dylan Ruediger, and
Christoph Strobel for their critical readings of and constructive comments on earlier
versions of this paper.

Christine Skwiot is an associate professor of history
and humanities at Maine Maritime Academy. You may reach her at christine.skwiot@mma.edu.

Notes

1 John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and
the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), 3–4.

2 Paul D'Arcy, "Warfare and State
Formation in Hawaii: The Limits on Violence as a Means of Political
Consolidation," Journal of Pacific
History 38, no. 1 (June 2003): 29–52, especially 36, 40, 44; George
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the
North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 5 volumes (New York: De Capo
Press, 1967) III, 155.

4 Wim Klooster argues that the chief
objective of the transatlantic revolutions in the Americas was or became
sovereignty; his argument applies to the Hawaiian wars of unification, which
also became wars for sovereignty as a result of inter-imperial rivalries in the
Pacific. Klooster, Revolutions in the
Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press,
2009), 165.

5 On the idea of the world stage, see Patrick Manning "Locating Africans on the World Stage: A Problem in World History," Journal of World History 26, no. 3 (September 2015), 605–637.

6 The colonies that became the United
States declared their independence in 1776, won their independence and signed
the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and ratified the Constitution and elected their
first president in 1789. In uniting the separate islands of Hawaiʻi
into a single state under his sole sovereignty, Kamehameha asserted control of
the Island of Hawaiʻi in 1791, conquered Maui, Molokaʻi, and Oʻahu in 1795, and
peaceably incorporated Kauaʻi and Niʻihau into his realm in 1810.

7 On the Pacific Ocean as a second New
World for Europeans, Alan Frost, "The Pacific Ocean: the eighteenth century's
'new world,'" Studies on Voltaire and the
Eighteenth Century 152 (1976): 779–822. J.H. Elliott argues that Europeans
viewed the Americas as "peculiarly artifacts" of Europe in ways that "Africa
and Asia were not," while Oliver Spate argues that they regarded Oceania as an
"invention" of Europe. J. H. Elliott , The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5; O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan, vol. 1, The Spanish Lake (Canberra: Australian National University, 1979),
ix.

8 Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2014); Michael Witgen, An
Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Kate Fullagar, ed., The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects
and Transformations Since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

9 While sovereignty was difficult to obtain and to keep in the age of
revolutions, Jennifer Pitts compellingly argues that the late 18th century "stands out in the history of the law of nations as [a period] of
striking openness on the part of Europeans to the possibility of shared legal
frameworks and mutual obligations between Christians and non-Christians,
Europeans and non-Europeans." Jennifer Pitts, "Empire and Legal Universalisms
in the Eighteenth Century," American
Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 92–121, citation, 95. See
also Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of
the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of
International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David
Armitage, The Declaration of
Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and
Peace: Political Thought and International Order from Grotius to Kant (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

11 Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century
British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000); Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

12 On the use of the future and
conditional tense to describe the U.S. as exceptional, Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America:
Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993), 135 ff.

13 Richard Price, Observations on
the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Rendering It a
Benefit to the World (Dublin: L. White, W. Whiteston, P. Byrne, P. Wogan,
J. Cash, and R. Marchbank, 1785), 69.

21 Michael A. McDonnell and Kate
Fullagar, "Facing Empire: Indigenous experiences of European empire in
comparative perspective, 1760–1820," in Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie,
eds., The Routledge History of Western
Empires (New York: Routledge, 2014), 60. See also Saunt, West of the Revolution.

22 David Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of
Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), vii.

24 For Hawaiʻi,
Kirch, A Shark Going Inland is My Chief,
226–233, 244–246; for a succinct synthesis of this large literature on Europe
on this topic, see Robert B. Marks, The
Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the
Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, 3rd edition, (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 86–96.

31 Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's
Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 8,
10.

32 Cook in J.C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook, Volume
III: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, Part One (Cambridge: for
the Hakluyt Society at the University Press, 1967), I, 279.

33 Wade Graham, "Traffick According to
Their Own Caprice: Trade and Biological Exchange in the Making of the Pacific
World, 1766–1825," paper presented at the Conference on Seascapes, Littoral
Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.,
February 12–15, 2003, http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/graham.html.

34 Patrick
Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds:
An Archeological History of the Pacific Islands before Contact (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 248.

35 Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press 2010), 74.

43 King and quote the Admiralty's
editor attributed to Cook cited by Oswald Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 155, 156; see also Glyn Williams, The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and
Unmade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 57, 58. Hawaiʻi soon
displaced Tahiti as the hub of commercial intercourse and ethnographic debate
in the Pacific; see Harry Liebersohn, The
Traveler's World: Europe in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 5.

44 John Gasciogne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 326.

45 The phrase "royal fraternity" is
Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of
the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1968), 50; numerous Western travel
accounts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries cite
Kamehameha referring to King George as "his brother" or "his loving brother."

50 For a wonderful analysis of the
foreign travels of Kaʻiana, a high-ranking aliʻi from
Kauaʻi who advised Kamehameha for a time, aboard Captain John Meares' ship in
1787; how his explorations of Macao, the Pacific, and Westerners shaped his
understanding of race, nation, and the world of nations; and, how he applied
what he learned to navigate Hawaiian politics and foreign visitors upon his
return, see Chang, The World and All the
Things upon It, especially 38, 49–58–53, 71–77.

51 Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South Seas
and Beering's Straits…in the Years 1815–1818 (New York: De Capo, 1967), I,
303.

52 Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment, 401.

53 Patrick V. Kirch and Marshall
Sahlins, Anahulu: The Anthropology of
History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 38–41.

77 Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment, 415.

78 John Curtis Perry, Facing West: America and the Opening of the
Pacific (Westport: Conn.: Praeger, 1994); 45. His interpretations is part
of a professional scholarly tradition that dates to Harold Whitman Bradley, The American Frontier in Hawaii: The
Pioneers, 1789–1843 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1943).

81 While exceptionalism denotes uniqueness,
scholars have begun to explore exceptionalisms as entangled productions in a
growing literature from which I cite two particularly insightful works. See
Greg Grandin's comparative analysis of the competitive politics of U.S. and
Latin American exceptionalisms, "The Liberal Traditions in the Americas:
Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism," American Historical Review 117, no. 1
(February 2012): 68–91. On the entangled development of British and American
exceptionalisms, see Ezra Tawil, "'New Forms of Sublimity': 'Edgar Huntly' and
the European Origins of American Exceptionalism," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 40, no. 1/2 (Fall 2006–Spring 2007): 104–124. On cross-cultural performances of
Englishness, see Wilson, Island Race.

82 Brendan McConville, The King's Three Face: The Rise and Fall of
Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2006), ///; Frank Prochaska, The Eagle
and the Crown: Americans and the British Monarchy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008), 9.

90 It is not within the scope of this
paper to engage the enormous literature on whether or not Hawaiians regarded
Cook as Lono, a god or akua. Nonetheless, Nicholas Thomas authoritatively
argues, "Cook was not take to be a god, not if a god is a supreme being, of a
supernatural or transcendental nature, categorically distinct from any humans.
Polynesians recognized no such gulf between the beings they called atua and or in Hawaii akua and living men and women. Gods
themselves had varied natures, ranging from the abstract and elemental…to the
essentially human and historical, in that of deified ancestors of chiefs. But
divinity and humanity always shaded together." Thomas, Cook, 384.

105 Adelbert von Chamisso, A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov
Exploring Expedition in the Years 181–1818 in the Brig Rurik,, trans. Henry Kratz (Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986), 117; Williams, The Death of Captain Cook, 96.

106 Chamisso, A Voyage Around the World, 117; see also Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery, 302–303.

117 John Young cited by John Boit in Log of the Union: John Boit's Remarkable
Voyage to the Northwest Coast and Around the World, 1794–1796, ed. Edmund
Hayes (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1981), 77.

124 David Armitage and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, "Introduction: The Age of Revolutions, c. 1760–1840—Global
Causation, Connection, and Comparison," in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context,
especially xvi–xviii.

125 Ben Finney, "The Other One-Third of
the Globe," Journal of World History 5, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 273–297.

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